Complete list of what’s new in Movie Maker and Photo Gallery

Recently Microsoft released new versions of Windows Movie Maker and Photo Gallery for Windows 7 and Windows 8. We had earlier seen some of the features included in the new version. In this post, we will check all the new features one by one, the complete listing courtesy Microsoft Answers.

New features added in Movie Maker

Audio Narration – Many a times after recording your video, while watching its playback you want to describe actually what’s happening or want to record an audio comment. Now you can do so easily. Movie Maker now allows you to record narration and you can do it while watching your video playback. Then you can then save it as an audio file which can be added as separate audio track. You can even add sound effects to the narration track.

Narration can be recorded by clicking on the Record Narration button in the Home tab, or by clicking on the drop-down portion of the button to add an audio file to the narration track.

Audio Waveforms – With Waveforms you can know on the Time scale, where the audio is. It also helps while editing, as it makes it easy in determining the high and low points location. The waveform can be enabled from View tab > Waveforms.

Audio Ducking and Emphasis – When you add a narration, the audio from all other tracks will be temporarily reduced (ducked) while there is audible content on the narration track.

“You can also change the priority (emphasized) to one of the other audio tracks, reducing the volume on the remaining tracks. You may also adjust the mix between the two non-emphasized tracks. By default the narration track will be emphasized.”

These options are available in the Project tab.

Music Store download integration– Many times it becomes difficult, for the right kind of music to be added to your movie, and that too with appropriate rights. Even if you add from your collection, it runs the risk of being stripped out once it’s published to a music channel for not having the appropriate rights. Microsoft now decided to work with AudioMicro, Free Music Archive, and the Vimeo Music Store to make it easy to find music that also has the proper rights.

“Additionally, when you apply a theme to your movies, the credits are updated to include the artists who created the music.”

Now when you go to add music to your movie, you have the option of getting music from your PC or from three varied music services.

Deferred Encode Proxy and Disable Transcoding Options – When you add a non-natively supported movie to Movie Maker for editing, it’ll now generate low-resolution video previews more quickly than earlier versions. You can also disable movie preview of non-natively supported movies when saving a movie – but it may have a negative impact on performance. These options are available in File > Options >Advanced.

MPEG-4/H.264 Encoding (MP4) – Movie Maker now supports MPEG-4/H.264 encoding. The H.264 format which is becoming very popular and is the default format for cameras and video sharing is also the default format for Movie Maker in saving the videos. Thus, it makes it easier to publish your video to popular sharing websites, managing files between services and devices. This format also reduces the amount of storage required for saving movies. You still have the option to save the movies in WMV format.

Video Stabilization and Rolling Shutter Correction – Many times the video you have shots appear shaky, as though you haven taken it on a bumpy ride. Movie Maker now has an option to stabilize your shaky videos and correct the wobbling in your Movies, using the new Stabilization and Wobble Correction (Rolling Shutter correction) features. Please note this feature is available in Windows 8 only – and can be accessed from Edit tab’s Videos stabilization button/drop-down. This new feature has been getting appreciation – as video stabilization in Movie Maker far exceeds the quality of equivalent features in Virtual Dub and Adobe Premier.

Videos As Audio – You can now use your Video files as an audio source for your audio tracks. To add your audio source from a video file, you can select the Add Music button and then select video extensions to display video files. Check the large number of formats it supports.

Vimeo Publishing Plugin – Vimeo.com, one of the leading video sharing sites is the new publish partner! Now you can share your videos straight to Vimeo from both Movie Maker and Photo Gallery.

Auto-Save – Project files are now periodically saved when working on your projects. This Auto-save option will help you to recover data from your Projects in case of unexpected closure.

New features added in Photo Gallery

Vimeo Publishing Plugin – This feature and is also available in Photo Gallery 2012 too.

Auto Collage – Now you can select various pictures of your choice and create a Collage out of them. Earlier we had to make use of some other freeware collage maker to do this. Now we have this feature built into Photo Gallery.

Please note that for creating a Collage you require a minimum of 7 images.

You can use a maximum 50 images for making the collage.

These are the complete listing of what’s new in Movie Maker and Photo Gallery 2012. Download it and check it out now if you haven’t!

The author has been a Microsoft MVP awardee in various Windows categories (2006-2016) and currently a Windows Insider MVP. A Technology Enthusiast, interested in anything technical and is committed to Microsoft technologies and products. He is actively associated with various Microsoft online communities, forums, Newsgroups and has been actively involved in Beta testing various Microsoft products and bug submissions.

3 Comments

I am right there with ya Greg. Most of these sites treat older Windows OS’s like they have the plague and you know why that is? because they are trying manipulate those with older Windows OS’s to make the transfer to Windows 7 or to purchase 8.

I understand where you are coming from. Having Vista installed, and not seeing it being mentioned must be a bit annoying. There are still many XP users too, yet that OS is not mentioned. Its really not possible to mention all the OS’s. What runs on Windows 7, does normally run on Vista, and will mostly run on XP too. So it is only out of convenience that we mention the latest or the last two OS’s. Nothing more to it, really. 🙂